External relationships

MIT has close ties to a number of institutions. The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, now an independent defense contractor, was founded as the
MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, and still shares some facilities and faculty with MIT. (The Draper Lab, which designed missile
guidance systems, was spun off during the Vietnam War to assuage antiwar
feeling on campus and in the city of Cambridge, while holding on to the more lucrative defense contracts at Lincoln Laboratory.) The Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution runs its graduate program jointly with MIT.MIT has a friendly rivalry with Harvard University which
dates back to the earliest days of the Institute, and the aforementioned merger talks between the two schools. Today, they
cooperate as much as they compete, with many joint conferences and programs, including the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Harvard-MIT Data Center. In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register
(i.e., MIT students can register for courses offered at Harvard, and vice versa) without any additional fees, for credits toward
their own school's degrees. A similar cross-registration program exists with Wellesley College. The city of Cambridge is notable for the presence of two major research universities
within two miles of each other. A third major research university, Boston University, is located between MIT and Harvard on the Boston side of the Charles River. These three schools jointly run the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and
Technology.MIT maintains an alliance with the University of
Cambridge known as the Cambridge-MIT Institute,
which was established with the British government to bring the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT to England and to increase knowledge
exchange between universities and industry. The World
Wide Web Consortium is also based at MIT. MIT also has close but informal ties with one of the United Kingdom's top engineering universities, the University of Southampton, which has its own thriving collection of spin-off businesses.MIT has also set up relationships with the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore known as the Singapore-MIT alliance. This has enabled it to take quality engineering education to a higher number
of students. In 2004, MIT setup the MIT-Zaragoza Logistics Program modelled on its own masters degree in logistics. The MIT-Zaragoza program was set up with the local government of Aragon, University of Zaragoza and MIT and hopes to bring quality education in logistics and supply chain
management to Europe.